A great tablet that still costs a little too much

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The iPad mini 2 won't be a surprise to anyone running a current iPhone or iPad, as it launched with iOS 7 and can now be updated to iOS 8, or more specifically iOS 8.3.

But beyond the new features we're happy to report the iPad mini 2 is nice and fast, despite being a touch slower when it comes to CPU performance compared with the iPad Air.

We're getting to a point where describing a smartphone or tablet as quick under the finger is pointless – once you reach a certain point there's not a lot more speed to be gained.

Even dual-core phones were more than acceptable, so why make a point of highlighting the speed of the new iPad?

Well, it's just virtually flawless through all kinds of tasks. A millisecond faster from a finger press might not seem like much, but once you do a hundred or a thousand of them in a day, and then go back to the previous iPad mini, you'll realise that there's a real difference in the operation.

The iPad mini 2 is slightly behind the iPad Air in benchmarking terms, but leagues ahead of the Nexus 7, scoring 2,220 on the GeekBench 3 "real world" testing compared to the Tegra 3-powered Google device, which managed just 1,800.

However, Apple's claims of total speed domination don't appear to be completely founded, as the Amazon Kindle Fire HDX, with its Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 chip, was marginally faster in our tests.

The two both performed amazingly well, but it's interesting to note that in performance terms, Apple can't justify the improvement as a reason for a higher cost.

iOS 7 and iOS 8: an all new face

Like it or loathe it, iOS 7 was still a real step forward for a company that desperately needed to refresh its offering in the face of stiff competition from Android and iOS 8 further improves things.

The new flatter interface takes away the pointless need to pretend all apps are real-life objects just to integrate them into people's lives - users know that pressing the Photos app will take them there, no matter the result.

Like most popular platforms that get upgraded, there was a large amount of flack coming Apple's way for iOS 7, with juddery icons shown when returning to the homescreen.

This can be negated by heading into Settings, General, Accessibility and then toggling "Reduce Motion" to On, which creates a much nicer fade transition.

Things like the Parallax effect, which moves the image in the background to create a 3D effect, are much more stable on the iPad mini 2.

­­And while this was annoyingly unpredictable on the iPhone 5S, on the mini 2 it's much better and we wouldn't advise you turn it off, unlike on other Apple devices.

It doesn't even have a huge effect on battery life, which is impressive in itself.

The rest of the interface is easy to use and makes sense for the most part. One of the bigger features of iOS 7 was the notification bar, found by dragging from the top of the tablet. This gives access to updates, calendar entries and missed messages.

Initially it was one of the weaker parts of the OS, as it always started on the calendar, which doesn't often give a lot of useful information.

The "Missed" section was often also sparsely populated, but update to iOS 8 and a swipe will start you on the Today and Notifications menu, the latter of which is a condensed version of the All and Missed tabs from iOS 7 and it's a big improvement all round, putting more relevant information at the fore.

However, there are a lot of other areas in which the Cupertino brand has made strides in terms of improving the user experience with iOS 7 and iOS 8.

For instance, swiping upwards with all five fingers (or double tapping the home button) will lead to the multi-tasking pane, which shows all of your apps in large thumbnails.

This is an excellent interface, although perhaps a little large, and you can swiftly jump between apps or flick a thumbnail upwards to end it.

We would like to give a special mention to the "five finger pinch" if you've not used it before on previous iPads. Make sure it's enabled in Settings > General, and then simply pinch in with four or five fingers in any app to return to the home screen. You'll be doing it on your phone before you know it, such is its simplicity.

The new Control Center is something worth highlighting too - drag up from the bottom of the screen and you can control music, brightness, turn on Wi-Fi and loads more.

We would have thought that most people know all about this feature, but the number of iOS 7 and iOS 8 users who get their minds blown when we show them that this exists means it's worth highlighting.

It's annoying you can't alter the toggles here, and long-pressing them doesn't move into the menu to get a more advanced look at things like Wi-Fi. Apple has clearly written the architecture to handle other toggles (like on most Android phones) so why it's not here is unclear.

Well, it is: Apple doesn't like the option of too much customization to keep things simple. For some that's amazing, for others it feels locked down and far too authoritarian on a device they've paid a lot of money for.

There are tonnes of nuances to Apples UI that we'd like to laud here, but we invite you to go and use it for yourself, as despite there being no tutorial, there's very little here that the novice user won't be able to pick up.

And it is well worth upgrading the iPad mini 2 to iOS 8.3, for new features such as keyboard extensions, Siri improvements and more.

iPad mini was designed to give you nothing less than the full iPad experience. So when we thought about which enhancements to bring to the new iPad mini, there was only one answer:all of them. We packed a Retina display, the A7 chip, the M7 coprocessor, advanced wireless, and more into its small form. It has a huge amount of power and capability, but it's still nice and mini.